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cvprasad
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605 to 665, and Quant from Q80 to Q87 (e-GMAT) 12 Aug 2026, 02:22
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I turned up to every check-in with my own analysis. What I could not do on my own was work out which of my explanations was the real one.

The "what if this doesn't work out" thought

That one crept in every now and then through the middle of this, far more often than any question about what to study next. I had written the GMAT once and got a 605 (V81, Q80, DI79). Before that, two practice mocks 70 points apart, a 645 and a 575, with no idea which of the two was actually me. The course I used earlier left gaps I could not see for myself, so more questions were never going to be the answer. What I needed was something that showed me where I was leaking. I finished at 665 (V83, Q87, DI79), which is the 92nd percentile.

Some context on the constraints. I work full time, about 8 years in, and I travel a good bit for work. Most of this happened late in the evening after a full day, and there were stretches where a work week simply took the whole week.

Verbal: my read, and the part of it I had backwards

My habit through all of this was to analyse my own performance before asking anyone anything. Go through the mock, mark what broke, turn up with a theory. Early on my theory was that I was crumbling under time pressure. Dhruv read the same data and did not agree: on the hard CR questions I was getting wrong, I had already spent 2.5 to 3 minutes each, which is adequate time on a question. If the clock were the real cause, that extra minute would have saved them.

So the direction of my read was right. Something was breaking mid-question. The label I had put on it was wrong. What was actually happening is that I was over-analysing. Some questions really are simple, and I would look at a simple correct choice and think, no, it cannot be this straightforward, and then build an elaborate route to a worse one. I went back through that mock and sent across 8 questions with my own breakdown of exactly where each one went off. From that point we were both working on the same problem.

The fix itself was repetition. Scholaranium holds every question you have attempted along with whether you got it right, so I went back and reattempted all my incorrect CR and RC there, untimed, with the focus fully on process and none on the clock. Then 15 hard CR questions on Neuron, which is the official-style library where every question carries a full step-by-step solution, so you can hold your own route against a clean one. Then the same again, timed. Nothing clever about any of it. Hard CR closed at 70% on my last set of 10, timed.

By March verbal was still coming back at the 57th percentile, and I was given two options: keep fighting hard CR, or pause verbal completely and start quant. I took quant. It felt like giving up at the time and it was the highest-value call I made all year. Verbal closed at V83.

Quant: 20% to 90%, one block at a time

End of March. First hard Number Properties cementing quiz in Standard mode, which is the timed one that runs at real exam pace: 20%. 2 out of 10. I went back to the same questions untimed, without opening a single solution, and got 6 or 7 of them. So the knowledge was sitting there. Producing it against a clock was the gap.

I wanted to retake the quiz that same weekend and fix the number, and I was told not to. Scholaranium does not hand you one score for a subsection. It splits the subsection into blocks, which are named clusters of closely related skills, each carrying its own accuracy figure. Number Properties comes apart into four of them: basics, estimation and even-odd; LCM-GCD and primes; divisibility, remainders and unit digits; and statistics. Mine read 50% on the second and 44% on the third, and the other two were healthy. So this was never a Number Properties problem. It was 2 named blocks sitting inside it.

I took those 2 into Neuron, worked the full solution on everything I had missed, and realised my own method was running slower than the one in the explanation. So I switched to theirs. Back in Standard mode it read 20, 20, 50, 50, 90 across about 8 weeks. Two of those attempts moved me nowhere at all, which is the part nobody writes up. LCM-GCD and primes went from 50% to 90%, and I closed the subsection off myself.

Advanced Topics went the same way. Three hard quizzes at 40% in a row, no timing pressure that I could feel, and no visible pattern to it. That subsection splits into 3 blocks: permutations and combinations, sets, and probability. Broken apart, my 40% was sets at 2 out of 3, probability at 40%, and permutations and combinations at 2 out of 11. One block was carrying the entire deficit. I had already started working counting versus arranging on Neuron before that read came back, and the next quiz came in at 80%.

None of this converts without the quant sectional mocks, which are full timed sections rather than short quizzes. Knowing something and holding it together across a whole timed section are two different skills, and only the sectionals built the second one. Quant was my weakest section on percentile when I started, Q80 at the 64th. It finished at Q87, the 94th, and was my strongest by a distance.

The mocks

I under-tested, and I would not recommend copying that. Across 7 months I sat exactly one e-GMAT full-length, 6 days out: 675 (V82, Q89, DI80). It called my actual score to within 10 points. What I did take constantly were sectionals and cementing quizzes, 71 of the latter across 10 subsections.

The one mechanic I would not skip is the Relaxed-then-Standard sequence on those cementing quizzes. Relaxed is untimed and tells you whether you know the material. Standard runs at exam pace and tells you whether you can deliver it. I jumped ahead to Standard more than once, read the bad score as evidence I had not understood the topic, and went back to relearn things I already knew perfectly well. That cost me weeks.

Mocks bounce. Mine swung 70 points before I started here. The block numbers underneath them did not.

Mentorship, and the error log

I qualified for LMP early. It is e-GMAT's invite-only mentorship for the closing phase, where a mentor reads your platform data and picks up the behavioural patterns capping your score. The first thing it gave me was an accountability partner. There were stretches where I went quiet for weeks because things were not working out, and an email would land asking what was happening, and that brought me back to the groove. With work travel running alongside, holding that accountability on your own is very difficult.

The other half was the error log, and that one was mine. Nobody asked for it in the format I ended up building: every quiz, every question, the reason it went wrong, and the theme to fix, 28 rows at a stretch. I resisted it for a long time because it ate time I did not have, and it became the single most useful thing I did. On my own I had a different explanation for every error. Once the rows were in front of me, 30 explanations collapsed into 2 repeating habits: mental maths slips, and missing something small in the question stem. On exam day I had 2 things to watch for. Thank you to Dhruv and to Jagadish for actually reading them. If your fundamentals are in place and you are stuck without knowing why, do look into LMP.

What I would take away

  • Bring your own analysis. Turning up with a score and no theory is worth far less, and the habit of writing down why each question went wrong is what made every later conversation useful. Just hold the theory loosely enough to let the data resize it.
  • Never read three identical percentages as a plateau. Split by block and one of them is usually carrying the rest.
  • Scholaranium runs harder than the real thing. I was at around 60-65% there against roughly 80% on Neuron, and that gap is deliberate. Do not read a low Scholaranium score as a prediction of your exam.

Final thoughts

There was a lot of self-doubt in all this, and a point where I had nearly settled for the score I had. What I keep telling myself is the same thing: it is okay, keep moving.
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605 to 665, and Quant from Q80 to Q87 (e-GMAT) 13 Aug 2026, 06:15
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Valuable insights. Thanks for the post.
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605 to 665, and Quant from Q80 to Q87 (e-GMAT) 13 Aug 2026, 07:44
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Congratulations for score.. all the best with applications
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605 to 665, and Quant from Q80 to Q87 (e-GMAT) 13 Aug 2026, 08:08
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great... congratulations for the score
cvprasad
I turned up to every check-in with my own analysis. What I could not do on my own was work out which of my explanations was the real one.

The "what if this doesn't work out" thought

That one crept in every now and then through the middle of this, far more often than any question about what to study next. I had written the GMAT once and got a 605 (V81, Q80, DI79). Before that, two practice mocks 70 points apart, a 645 and a 575, with no idea which of the two was actually me. The course I used earlier left gaps I could not see for myself, so more questions were never going to be the answer. What I needed was something that showed me where I was leaking. I finished at 665 (V83, Q87, DI79), which is the 92nd percentile.

Some context on the constraints. I work full time, about 8 years in, and I travel a good bit for work. Most of this happened late in the evening after a full day, and there were stretches where a work week simply took the whole week.

Verbal: my read, and the part of it I had backwards

My habit through all of this was to analyse my own performance before asking anyone anything. Go through the mock, mark what broke, turn up with a theory. Early on my theory was that I was crumbling under time pressure. Dhruv read the same data and did not agree: on the hard CR questions I was getting wrong, I had already spent 2.5 to 3 minutes each, which is adequate time on a question. If the clock were the real cause, that extra minute would have saved them.

So the direction of my read was right. Something was breaking mid-question. The label I had put on it was wrong. What was actually happening is that I was over-analysing. Some questions really are simple, and I would look at a simple correct choice and think, no, it cannot be this straightforward, and then build an elaborate route to a worse one. I went back through that mock and sent across 8 questions with my own breakdown of exactly where each one went off. From that point we were both working on the same problem.

The fix itself was repetition. Scholaranium holds every question you have attempted along with whether you got it right, so I went back and reattempted all my incorrect CR and RC there, untimed, with the focus fully on process and none on the clock. Then 15 hard CR questions on Neuron, which is the official-style library where every question carries a full step-by-step solution, so you can hold your own route against a clean one. Then the same again, timed. Nothing clever about any of it. Hard CR closed at 70% on my last set of 10, timed.

By March verbal was still coming back at the 57th percentile, and I was given two options: keep fighting hard CR, or pause verbal completely and start quant. I took quant. It felt like giving up at the time and it was the highest-value call I made all year. Verbal closed at V83.

Quant: 20% to 90%, one block at a time

End of March. First hard Number Properties cementing quiz in Standard mode, which is the timed one that runs at real exam pace: 20%. 2 out of 10. I went back to the same questions untimed, without opening a single solution, and got 6 or 7 of them. So the knowledge was sitting there. Producing it against a clock was the gap.

I wanted to retake the quiz that same weekend and fix the number, and I was told not to. Scholaranium does not hand you one score for a subsection. It splits the subsection into blocks, which are named clusters of closely related skills, each carrying its own accuracy figure. Number Properties comes apart into four of them: basics, estimation and even-odd; LCM-GCD and primes; divisibility, remainders and unit digits; and statistics. Mine read 50% on the second and 44% on the third, and the other two were healthy. So this was never a Number Properties problem. It was 2 named blocks sitting inside it.

I took those 2 into Neuron, worked the full solution on everything I had missed, and realised my own method was running slower than the one in the explanation. So I switched to theirs. Back in Standard mode it read 20, 20, 50, 50, 90 across about 8 weeks. Two of those attempts moved me nowhere at all, which is the part nobody writes up. LCM-GCD and primes went from 50% to 90%, and I closed the subsection off myself.

Advanced Topics went the same way. Three hard quizzes at 40% in a row, no timing pressure that I could feel, and no visible pattern to it. That subsection splits into 3 blocks: permutations and combinations, sets, and probability. Broken apart, my 40% was sets at 2 out of 3, probability at 40%, and permutations and combinations at 2 out of 11. One block was carrying the entire deficit. I had already started working counting versus arranging on Neuron before that read came back, and the next quiz came in at 80%.

None of this converts without the quant sectional mocks, which are full timed sections rather than short quizzes. Knowing something and holding it together across a whole timed section are two different skills, and only the sectionals built the second one. Quant was my weakest section on percentile when I started, Q80 at the 64th. It finished at Q87, the 94th, and was my strongest by a distance.

The mocks

I under-tested, and I would not recommend copying that. Across 7 months I sat exactly one e-GMAT full-length, 6 days out: 675 (V82, Q89, DI80). It called my actual score to within 10 points. What I did take constantly were sectionals and cementing quizzes, 71 of the latter across 10 subsections.

The one mechanic I would not skip is the Relaxed-then-Standard sequence on those cementing quizzes. Relaxed is untimed and tells you whether you know the material. Standard runs at exam pace and tells you whether you can deliver it. I jumped ahead to Standard more than once, read the bad score as evidence I had not understood the topic, and went back to relearn things I already knew perfectly well. That cost me weeks.

Mocks bounce. Mine swung 70 points before I started here. The block numbers underneath them did not.

Mentorship, and the error log

I qualified for LMP early. It is e-GMAT's invite-only mentorship for the closing phase, where a mentor reads your platform data and picks up the behavioural patterns capping your score. The first thing it gave me was an accountability partner. There were stretches where I went quiet for weeks because things were not working out, and an email would land asking what was happening, and that brought me back to the groove. With work travel running alongside, holding that accountability on your own is very difficult.

The other half was the error log, and that one was mine. Nobody asked for it in the format I ended up building: every quiz, every question, the reason it went wrong, and the theme to fix, 28 rows at a stretch. I resisted it for a long time because it ate time I did not have, and it became the single most useful thing I did. On my own I had a different explanation for every error. Once the rows were in front of me, 30 explanations collapsed into 2 repeating habits: mental maths slips, and missing something small in the question stem. On exam day I had 2 things to watch for. Thank you to Dhruv and to Jagadish for actually reading them. If your fundamentals are in place and you are stuck without knowing why, do look into LMP.

What I would take away

  • Bring your own analysis. Turning up with a score and no theory is worth far less, and the habit of writing down why each question went wrong is what made every later conversation useful. Just hold the theory loosely enough to let the data resize it.
  • Never read three identical percentages as a plateau. Split by block and one of them is usually carrying the rest.
  • Scholaranium runs harder than the real thing. I was at around 60-65% there against roughly 80% on Neuron, and that gap is deliberate. Do not read a low Scholaranium score as a prediction of your exam.

Final thoughts

There was a lot of self-doubt in all this, and a point where I had nearly settled for the score I had. What I keep telling myself is the same thing: it is okay, keep moving.
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